title: Engineering in vitro microenvironments for cell based therapies and drug discovery.
abstract: Traditional ex vivo culture setups fail to imitate the native tissue niche, leading to cellular senescence, phenotypic drift, growth arrest and loss of stem cell multipotency. Growing evidence suggests that surface topography, substrate stiffness, mechanical stimulation, oxygen tension and localised density influence cellular functions and longevity, enhance tissue-specific extracellular matrix deposition and direct stem cell differentiation. In this review, we discuss how these cues will facilitate engineering of physiological in vitro microenvironments to enable clinical translation of cell based therapies and development of in vitro models for drug discovery applications.
authors.affiliation: Network of Excellence for Functional Biomaterials (NFB), National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway), Galway, Ireland.
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cigognini
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lomas
authors.forename: Pramod
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.forename: Abhigyan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Satyam
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: English
authors.forename: Ayesha
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Azeem
authors.forename: Abhay
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pandit
authors.forename: Dimitrios
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zeugolis
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D018929:Cell Culture Techniques; D002454:Cell Differentiation; D064987:Cell- and Tissue-Based Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D060833:Cellular Microenvironment; D016922:Cellular Senescence; D055808:Drug Discovery / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D013234:Stem Cells / Q000378:metabolism; D023822:Tissue Engineering / Q000379:methods*